January 5, 2025
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
John 1:10-18
Full of Grace and Truth
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
At Christmas we celebrate that the divine presence of God took on our human flesh. He came to us in our human flesh and blood. He became as one of us.
John uses a very unique word to describe Jesus living among us. It literally means “to pitch a tent.” John says Jesus “pitched his tent” among us!
Raise your hand if you like camping. There’s something vulnerable about tenting.
Tents and God have a very long tradition in Judaism. After Israel had been liberated from their long slavery in Egypt, they traveled on foot through the wilderness for 40 years before returning to the land of Canaan. They lived in tents.
During that long journey, God instructed Israel to construct a special tent for their holy worship space. They called it by the fancy word of tabernacle, but it was basically a tent. Inside the tent, at the far interior wall, they placed their holiest of all objects: the Ark of the Covenant. If you’ve seen the Indiana Jones movie, you can picture the ark: a box carried by two long poles, with angels kneeling on the cover.
Inside of that box were a number of things, but the most important were the stone tablets of the 10 commandments.
These commandments were given to Moses on the top of Mt. Sinai. God personally had written the commandments on the stone tablets. So these tablets contained the very word of God, the commandments, written by God’s very own hand.
When the tabernacle was all in order, with all of its decorations and furnishings and carvings, with all its bowls and censers and curtains and screens, then the holy ark of the covenant was brought inside.
And then something amazing happened. A cloud dropped down from the sky and covered over the tabernacle. And the tent was filled with the glory of God. It was so brilliant and so awesome that nobody could come close, not even Moses.
All this glory could only mean one thing: God’s presence was with them.
John is thinking of all this when he describes Jesus “tenting among us.” Jesus is the new tabernacle. He is where God interacts with humanity. In the flesh and blood person of Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph, God’s real presence has come among us. And in him we see the glory of God, full of grace and truth.
John never talks about Bethlehem, or the Roman census. He doesn’t say diddly about the shepherds in the hills or the angel chorus. No, he frames the whole amazing story in terms of the holy tabernacle. God has pitched God’s tent among us!
Once again, God writes God’s word and gives it to us. But this time, the Word isn’t etched in stone. This time, the divine word is revealed in flesh, the flesh of this baby Jesus.
There’s a big difference between stone and flesh. Stone is so much more rugged and durable. It lasts, literally, millions of years! Flesh and blood are very short-lived, by comparison. And most importantly, flesh is VULNERABLE.
Many years before, God gave Israel God’s very own word, carved into stone tablets. God gave them the holy commandments. It was very dramatic: Moses climbing to the top of Mount Sinai, the lightening flashing, the thunder booming.
But this time, the gift came silently, told only to insignificant shepherd folk. Jesus was born in a stable. He came covered in blood and birth fluids. He was wiped clean, shivering, crying, and wrapped up in a blanket. Is there anything more vulnerable than a little new-born baby?
Both contained God’s word, both were priceless gifts. But the difference between the two is quite stark.
There’s that old joke about the pig and the chicken who walk into the diner. A poster on the wall says, “Our specialty is ham and eggs.”
The pig says to the chicken, “Ham and eggs, I’m outta here!”
“Why?” said the chicken. “What’s the big deal about ham and eggs?”
“Well,” the pig said, “To make ham and eggs, you’re involved, for sure, but I’m committed!”
The same could be said about stone and flesh. The stone tablets of the law convey God’s word to us. But for God’s word to take on human flesh and live among us, now, that’s commitment of an entirely different kind! This is God with us, Emmanuel!
In Christmas we celebrate this humble, vulnerable way that God has chosen to be with us. God didn’t come impervious, like a super hero. Jesus is no Superman in the guise of mild-mannered Clark Kent. No, he is genuinely one of us, living among us!
Jesus is born into this world. He’s embedded into our reality. His nativity is an accompaniment. He walks our paths, he feels our sorrows, he knows our disappointments and griefs. And he also revels in the joys of this beautiful world, the gift of community. He comes with a warm heart of compassion, not one formed of stone.
But the true gift of his enfleshed tenting among us won’t be made known until the other end of his human journey. Not his birth, but his death. This gift is embedded into his vulnerability. He will accompany us all the way, from the cradle to the grave, and beyond the grave, to the gates of hell. In all these realms, he will make his presence known. And his presence will utterly change them.
God’s word became flesh and tented among us. God was truly present in the flesh and blood person of Jesus. And it was precisely in this vulnerable and limited flesh that God has unleashed the full power of the divine to transform and make all things new.
This is the glory we have beheld. The glory of God’s presence, in the person of Jesus, reveals the fullness of God’s grace. We see the totality of God’s life-giving truth. We have beheld these in Christ Jesus our Lord, who came to us, tented in our flesh.
Our flesh is but temporary. And so also the earthly lifespan of Jesus. The eternal God intersected with our temporal reality for a certain time and in a specific place. But Jesus makes himself known again. He comes once again in the flesh and blood, even to us, through his holy supper. In, with, and under the bread and wine, Jesus makes himself known. He comes, truly present, as present as he was in that Bethlehem stable, in the elements of this meal. We take him, and in this meal, he fill us. In our temporal, fleshly bodies, he is with us. He is in us, full of grace and truth.
